Day: March 23, 2023

Landmines are now killing at least 100 civilians a year since Myanmar’s military seized power in a February 2021 coup, sparking protests and armed resistance across the Southeast Asian country. The victims of mines deployed by the Myanmar junta and by some of its armed opponents often lose limbs in the explosions and are disabled for life, while cropland and forests are made inaccessible to villagers. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in April 2022 that at least 133 children and 257 adults had been killed or injured by landmines and other explosives since the coup.

Thai and Chinese investors have signed a power purchase agreement that paves the way for the construction of a third dam on the Mekong River in Laos.

The project in the Pak Lay district of northern Laos’ Xayaburi province – delayed for several years – could see work on basic infrastructure like a bridge and road access start immediately, according to an official from the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Construction is scheduled to begin early next year on the main structure, which is expected to be open for business by 2032, the official said.

The agreement between China’s Sinohydro Corp., Thailand’s Gulf Energy Development Public Co., Ltd., and the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) was signed Wednesday. 

The two previous Mekong mainstream dams – the Xayaburi Dam and the Don Sahong Dam – were completed in 2020. The Pak Lay Dam is one of several Mekong River projects in the planning or early construction stages as the government looks to generate revenue by selling the electricity from its hydropower projects to its neighbors, especially Thailand.

Eight villages to be resettled

But there are serious environmental concerns and questions about the economic viability of the major dam buildup. The Mekong is one of the world’s most biodiverse river basins with more than 1,100 species of fish. As the world’s largest inland fishery, the river is a vital food source for the 70 million people in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam who live in its basin.

A Lao conservation official pointed out that Thailand doesn’t really need the extra power generation. It already has more than 15% in reserve, and the Pak Lay project will just add more debt to the Thai public, the official said. 

Those working to get the dam built are more interested in helping investors than benefitting the livelihoods of local people, said Om Boun Thipsouna, the chairwoman of seven lower Mekong provinces of Thailand.

“The Mekong River doesn’t just belong to one country,” she said. “It is a common river.” 

The project will affect eight villages, with more than 3,500 people expected to be moved to a new settlement, according to an assessment from the dam builder.

One villager from Pak Lay district said most villagers don’t want to move from their villages where they already have land for farming, places to buy food, roads, schools and a temple. No official has come to talk to villagers about relocation and compensation yet, the villager added. 

Gulf Energy Development will have a 40% share of the 770 megawatt dam, with Sinohydro taking the remaining 60%. All power will be sold to EGAT, a state-owned enterprise under the supervision of Thailand’s Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Finance, during a 29 year-concession.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Edited by Matt Reed.

Authorities in western Thailand’s Tak province detained as many as 108 Myanmar nationals Wednesday in a series of raids on buildings believed to house members of anti-junta groups, confiscating what they claimed was military equipment.

The raids took place at around 1 p.m. in Tak’s Mae Sot district, along the border with Myanmar, and followed intelligence reports that members of Myanmar’s anti-junta People’s Defense Force paramilitary groups were being sheltered, according to reports from residents and the Bangkok Post.

“Thai military and immigration officers raided the [two] Ma Ruay Villa four-story buildings … making all the residents go out and sit in the streets,” a resident of a building near the compound told RFA Burmese, speaking on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal.

“Then they found two men with some drones and military equipment in an apartment. They took pictures and took them away. Then they let the other people in the building go and left.”

The Bangkok Post reported that authorities discovered more than 200 Myanmar nationals, including children, living in the buildings – many of whom “managed to flee.” It said authorities detained 83 illegal migrants for questioning and seized “bullets, military equipment and uniforms, drones, badges of some resistance groups, and medical supplies.”

But sources told RFA that as many as 108 people were detained in the raids and 106 were released after being interviewed by police. The two men held after authorities found them in possession of military equipment were reportedly released on Thursday.

The raids took place as a joint force of Chinese, Myanmar, and Thai police held an anti-human trafficking meeting in Tak province, which was also attended by Myanmar’s chief of police.

A Myanmar national who fled conflict at home to take refuge across the border in Mae Sot told RFA that security in the town was noticeably tighter on Wednesday.

“There are continuous arrests because the Myanmar chief of police is here, and I don’t dare go out,” he said. 

Additional raids took place on Thursday, according to sources, but no arrests were made as those interviewed by police provided proof of legal residence and permits to work in Thailand.

Searching for activists

A man who witnessed the raids and was briefly detained by authorities told RFA that police had been asking people about the identities of two individuals in photos they were carrying. They also asked those they interviewed whether they were members of the Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar that has seen tens of thousands of government employees leave their jobs in protest of the military’s Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

“We told them that there were no CDM or political activists here, only refugees of conflict,” said the man, who also declined to be named for security reasons. “They told us that we can stay here peacefully, but if we do anything … such as organizing political activities or supporting political activists in Myanmar, they would arrest us.”

Residents were also warned not to photograph Wednesday’s raid or post information about it on social media, or risk arrest.

The man told RFA that the two men who were held overnight became suspected of having ties to the PDF because “when they opened their doors [to police] … they were wearing camouflage shirts.”

“At that point, the police opened all their storage containers and found some drones, followed by computers and cameras,” he said.

“The young men claimed that they had only arrived there that day and suggested [the equipment] might have been owned by previous tenants. The officers still took them away but released them later.”

Arrests on the rise

Following the military coup in Myanmar, police in Thailand have made regular arrests of people fleeing across the border to escape what has become an increasingly widespread conflict between junta troops and various armed resistance groups.

Sources say Thai authorities have significantly stepped up random raids and arrests of Myanmar nationals living in Mae Sot in 2023.

In January, the Myawaddy-Mae Sot Friendship Bridge, which connects Thailand’s Tak province with Kayin state’s Myawaddy township in Myanmar’s east, resumed operations for the first time since 2020, when the two countries closed their borders due to the coronavirus pandemic.

That same month, international watchdog Fortify Rights reported that the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand would investigate the Thai government’s treatment of Myanmar refugees after the group shared evidence of potential violations. They included “forced returns, arbitrary arrests, detention and extortion by Thai authorities.”

Also in January, junta chief Min Aung Hlaing hosted Gen. Chalermpol Srisawat, Thailand’s military chief of staff, at a beach resort in Myanmar’s Rakhine state for talks that focused on military relations and stability issues along their 1,500-mile (2,415-kilometer) border.

The three-day meeting was the eighth annual gathering for the two nations’ military leaders.

Myanmar’s military is squaring off with anti-junta forces that include People’s Defense Force paramilitary groups and ethnic armies on multiple fronts in embattled Kayah, Kayin and Shan states, as well as Tanintharyi region, all of which border Thailand.

Since the military seized power in Myanmar, the Foundation for Education and Development has reported that arrests of Burmese migrants have at least doubled with deportations also on the rise. The Thai NGO recorded 1,400 migrants and 181 arrests in 2022.

A recent report from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that between 2,000 to 5,000 people a month returned to Myanmar in 2022. Most of them were deported. For those forced into exile, the risks loom large over their lives. 

According to the Migrant Workers Rights Network, the number of people crossing into Thailand from Myanmar increased from 100 per day in 2020 to 2,000 per day in 2022. Thai authorities reported that 60,000 migrants were arrested last year, including up to 45,000 that fled Myanmar. 

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Matt Reed.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on Thursday denied the popular social media app has links to the Chinese Communist Party, dismissing even the notion that its Beijing-based parent ByteDance is a Chinese company and arguing that it has no oversight over the app.

Chew was appearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in long-awaited testimony that was first announced Jan. 30, and which arrived after months of bipartisan and White House support for legislation to ban TikTok on national security grounds.

Testifying to the committee, Chew, who lives in Singapore, described TikTok as “a private company” that operates without oversight from its China-based parent, which he argued should not be characterized as a Chinese company but rather as “a company that is now global.”

“ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government,” he said in his opening remarks. “It’s a private company: 60% of the company is owned by global institutional investors, 20% is owned by the founder and 20% owned by employees around the world.”

The committee members accused the TikTok CEO of being disingenuous in trying to draw a distinction between his company and its parent, and queried how ByteDance could skirt strict Chinese legal requirements to provide requested data to Chinese authorities. 

Project Texas

Chew, in turn, repeatedly referred back to TikTok’s “Project Texas,” an ongoing effort to move data on its 150 million U.S.-based users to servers on American soil, which he said could be audited and put to rest concerns that ByteDance or Beijing can access the data.

“All protected U.S. data will be under the protection of U.S. law and under the control of the U.S.-led security team,” Chew said. “This eliminates the concern that some of you have shared with me that TikTok user data can be subject to Chinese law. This goes further, by the way, than what any other company in our industry has done.”

But lawmakers from both parties said they did not trust such assurances, and pointed out TikTok had in the past been caught lying about collecting keystroke data and “spying” on journalists.

They also noted that Chew had previously served as chief financial officer of ByteDance between March and November 2021 and was appointed as the chief executive officer of TikTok in April 2021, briefly serving in the two roles across the companies simultaneously.

During his five-hour testimony, the CEO repeatedly fended off claims TikTok was not honest about its links back to mainland China.

Rep. Janice Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, noted a BuzzFeed article from September 2021 quoting an anonymous former U.S.-based TikTok employee saying that “everything is seen in China.” Chew said “he disagreed with the statement,” and argued that Project Texas, when implemented, would in any case prevent that happening.

But few lawmakers were convinced.

Rep. Bill Johnson, a Republican from Ohio, said his background in information technology led him to believe TikTok would always be able to skirt auditing of U.S.-based servers, and that ByteDance would be able to interface with TikTok’s servers without leaving a trace.

“TikTok’s source code is riddled with backdoors and CCP censorship devices. Here’s the truth: In a million lines of code, the smallest shift from a zero to a one … will unlock explicit CCP censorship,” he said.

Rep. Jay Obernolte, a Republican from California, said he, too, did not believe it was “technically possible to accomplish what Tiktok says it will accomplish through Project Texas” due to the ease at which engineers, he argued, could insert hard-to-detect “backdoors.”

He also raised a leaked dossier from TikTok obtained by technology news website Gizmodo last year that tells company officials in public hearings to, among other things, “downplay the parent company ByteDance, downplay the China association, [and] downplay AI.”

Bipartisan support

Chew found few sympathizers on the committee during his testimony, with committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington state, setting the tone for proceedings with her bluntness.

“TikTok has repeatedly chosen the path for more control, more surveillance and more manipulation. Your platform should be banned,” McMorris Rodgers said, arguing that “ByteDance is beholden to the CCP, and ByteDance and TikTok are one in the same.”

She described TikTok’s popularity – it’s the fifth-most downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store and the third-most popular in Google’s Play App Store – as worse than “allowing the Soviet Union the power to produce Saturday morning cartoons during the Cold War.”

When lawmakers weren’t focussed on the national security implications of Beijing surveilling 150 million Americans, they were excoriating Chew for content they said harmed teenagers by promoting car theft, suicide and body-image problems and would be banned in China.

“The Chinese Communist Party is engaged in psychological warfare through Tik Tok,” said Rep. Buddy Carter, a Republican from Georgia, before listing viral “challenges” on the app, including the milk-crate challenge, the blackout challenge, the “NyQuil chicken” challenge, the Benadryl challenge and the “Dragon’s Breath liquid nitrogen trend.”

Chew said he was dismayed by reports of teenagers dying due to TikTok trends, but said content moderation was always improving and “the majority of people on the platform get a good experience.”

“It’s heartbreaking,” he said of the deaths.

China links

Yet the majority of the hearing was spent cross-examining Chew’s claims that TikTok is independent of ByteDance, and that ByteDance is able to operate independently in China as a private company.

“I’m one that doesn’t believe that there is really a private sector in China,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from California, pointing to article 7 and 10 of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which compel secretive cooperation with Chinese intelligence agencies.

“So I think that there is a real problem relative to our national security about the protection of user data,” Shoo said. She added it was therefore hard to believe any pledges Chew made about siloing U.S. data: “The Chinese government is not going to give that up.”

Many members also noted a Wall Street Journal article published hours before the hearing that quoted Chinese Commerce Ministry spokeswoman Shu Jueting saying Beijing would oppose a proposal from the Biden administration for TikTok to be sold to U.S. owners.  

That demonstrated, lawmakers argued, that the Chinese government itself believed it has an element of control over TikTok, even if Chew did not acknowledge that. “I do disagree with that characterization,” Chew responded, declining to comment further on the claim.

“I cannot speak on behalf of a Chinese government official,” he said.

But Chew did acknowledge he was in recent contact with ByteDance, after being asked by Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, if he had talked with TikTok’s parent company about how to testify.

“Congressman, this is a very high profile hearing. My phone is full of well-wishers,” Chew replied, adding that “a lot of people around the world were sending me wishes and unsolicited advice.”

Burgess then asked Chew if “attorneys representing ByteDance” were also representing TikTok. “Yes, I believe so,” he replied.

Censorship accusations

During the hearing, PEN America, a group that advocates for freedom of speech, also released a statement with a dozen other rights groups calling on Congress not to ban TikTok, which it said “would have serious consequences for free expression in the digital sphere.”

A group of TikTok users also held a press conference on Wednesday evening outside the Capitol calling for Congress to end its campaign to ban TikTok, led by Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat from New York, who said TikTok was no worse than American-owned social media.

“Why the hysteria and the panic and the targeting of TikTok?” Bowman said at the event. “It poses about the same threat that companies like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter pose.”

But it was the alleged control of China’s government over TikTok that occupied the minds of most lawmakers on the energy and commerce committee on Thursday, with nearly all appearing convinced that ultimate control over TikTok’s U.S. operations lies in Beijing.

Chew was firm, though, when asked directly if TikTok was censoring, on Beijing’s behalf, any content about issues like China’s genocide of the Uyghur ethnic minority or the 1989 Tiannanmen Square massacre. 

“We do not remove that kind of content,” he said. “That kind of content is available on our platform. You can go and search it.”

In the end, few of the committee members were swayed. “Quite frankly,” said Rep. Linda Blunt Rochester, a Democrat from Delaware, “your testimony has raised more questions for me than answers.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

A Tibetan Buddhist school in southwestern China is requiring entering students to obey the ruling Chinese Communist Party and oppose “separatists,” according to an admissions notice issued Thursday and obtained by Radio Free Asia.

The Tibetan Buddhist Institute in Sichuan province has made abiding by the CCP’s ideology and opposing those who advocate splitting the Tibet Autonomous Region from the rest of China conditions for being admitted to the school, which educates Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns. 

“Though the institute claims that its aim is to provide an opportunity to study Tibetan Buddhism, in reality, the Chinese government is using such institutions as a tool to Sinicize Tibetan Buddhism,” said Pema Gyal, a researcher at London–based Tibet Watch, a rights group.  

“So, from a human rights perspective, this is a violation of basic rights to education and determination.” 

 China maintains a tight grip on Tibet, restricting Tibetans’ political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity as Buddhists. Tibetans frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at wiping out their national and cultural identity.

“These days the Chinese Communist government has started implementing these kinds of despotic guidelines in not just high schools, but also for those in middle and elementary schools,” Gyal said. “It’s obvious their intention is to forcibly Sinicize Tibetans.”

Additionally, imposing Tibetan monks and nuns to follow and respect communist ideology is against the customs of Buddhism and the law of causality that Buddhists follow, said Tibetan rights analyst Sangey Kyap, who lives in Spain. 

“And whatsoever it is, these requirements basically are intended to force Tibetans to disrespect the Dalai Lama,” he said, referring to the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists who resides in Dharamsala, India, with members of the Tibet government-in-exile.

The Sichuan Tibetan Buddhist Institute was founded in 1984, though it was initially situated in the Tibetan town of Kardze and later moved to Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, in 2017. It offers religious instruction as well as instruction in Chinese socialist tradition and China’s history.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

The Hong Kong government has ordered the removal of a digital billboard installation containing the names of those who took part in the 2019 protest movement, while national security police have detained at least six former members of a now-disbanded pro-democracy labor union for questioning.

A piece by U.S. digital artist Patrick Amadon titled “No Rioters” was taken down from a digital display screen on the Sogo department store in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay shopping district, the artist said via his Twitter account.

“NO RIOTERS was taken down today at the request of the government,” Amadon, whose work included the names of protesters from the 2019 democracy movement, tweeted with a fist emoji.

The takedown came after the work was criticized by the Communist Party-backed Ta Kung Wen Wei media group in Hong Kong, which accused it of “supporting the rioters” following a frame-by-frame examination of the work, in which segments of text flash up briefly against the background of a moving surveillance camera in black and red.

Public support for the 2019 movement, which began as mass protests against the erosion of Hong Kong’s promised freedoms and broadened to include demands for fully democratic elections and great official accountability, has been outlawed under an ongoing crackdown on dissent in the city under a draconian 2020 national security law.

‘Hostile foreign forces’

Beijing has dismissed the protest movement as the work of “hostile foreign forces” who were trying to foment a “color revolution” in Hong Kong through successive waves of mass protests in recent years, and recently appointed hard-line former security chief Zheng Yanxiong, who made his name cracking down on the rebel Guangdong village of Wukan amid a bitter land dispute in 2011, as its new envoy in the city.

The founder and CEO of Art Innovation Gallery, Francesca Boffetti, said she believed the work was removed due to political content.

The work was removed as national security police detained at least six members of a now-disbanded pro-democracy labor union for questioning following the arrest of its co-founder Elizabeth Tang earlier this month, holding them for questioning for at least two days each, according to a post on Tang’s Facebook page.

“The national security law was like an ax, and the scariest thing is that many people could be targeted for arrest,” Isaac Cheng, a former leader of the now-dissolved pro-democracy party Demosisto now living overseas, told Radio Free Asia. 

“The government is also using reasons other than national security to arrest people, which means that anyone still in Hong Kong has to live in fear and censor themselves,” he said.

He said the authorities now seem to be going after anyone who could potentially organize others, including former politicians and union leaders like Tang and her husband Lee Cheuk-yan.

He said the authorities recently also revoked bail for veteran rights lawyer Albert Ho, who is awaiting trial on charges of “incitement to subvert state power” in connection with his work organizing now-banned annual candlelight vigils for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Cheng said the fact that the national security law applies anywhere in the world makes activists overseas worry that any lobbying work or protests they take part in could bring official retaliation down on the heads of associates still in Hong Kong.

Former pro-democracy lawmaker Nathan Law said he has cut off all contact with previous associates in Hong Kong.

“I haven’t been in touch with anyone I used to work with in Hong Kong for nearly two-and-a-half years,” Law told Radio Free Asia.

“This is the hope,” he said. “That they won’t be put under pressure.”

‘Enemies of the party’

Current affairs commentator Sang Pu said it wasn’t enough for several high-profile civil society groups to disband, if their leaders remained in Hong Kong.

“In the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, the organizations may have disbanded, but those people are still there,” he said. “These people are seen as the enemies of the party, so it can’t let it go.”

“They have to keep finding someone to fight against, to ensure that the struggle never ends, and they can keep on generating greater and greater fear,” Sang said.

The interrogations of the labor activists came as police announced that Hong Kong’s “anti-terrorism” hotline had received more than 14,500 messages from members of the public since last June.

An article in the Hong Kong police publication Offensive said some of the reports involved “threatening messages on social media,” adding that police are now considering offering rewards to people who inform on others for suspected “terrorism.”

The definition of “terrorism” has been applied to actions not normally seen in that way, including displaying the slogans of the 2019 protest movement. In July 2021, a Hong Kong court convicted motorcyclist Tong Ying-kit of “terrorism” and “secession,” handing him a nine-year prison sentence for flying a banner carrying the banned slogan “Free Hong Kong! Revolution now!” at a protest.

Taiwan national security researcher Shih Chian-yu, said the government is misleading the people of Hong Kong about what constitutes terrorism.

“This whole thing is pretty absurd, actually,” Shih said. “They are basically using terrorism as a way to force people to inform on each other.”

“They call it counterterrorism, but they’re actually carrying out monitoring of the population and political purges under that name,” he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.